Free The Rest is Silence by Scott Fotheringham

over her head. Once she was on the sidewalk, the cool morning air felt fresh. Underneath that, however, was a warmth that told her she’d be pulling off the sweatshirt once she got to the park. It was a straight run west, then down one block to the entrance at 69th Street, at which point her pace became steady. There were no cars on the park road. Some of the men she passed checked her out. If they smiled, she smiled in return, content, from the limber way her legs felt, that it was a good day. She increased her pace. Today she could run forever.
    Back at her apartment she showered, and she was heading for the lab by 8:30. Her calf muscles were sore in that way that reminded her of her run with each step. She walked down York Avenue to the entrance of the art deco building that housed both the hospital and her school. Her breath flowed without effort, like pulling a silk ribbon gently through the palm of your hand. Her mind was clear. Time stopped and she thought she might never again feel as healthy, fit, and complete as she did in that golden moment.
    The glass doors at the entrance were emblazoned with the university’s seal. She showed her ID and smiled at the security guards, two sullen men who had no doubt seen too many medical students with their white lab coats and their entitled airs, and refused, on principle or from ennui, to smile back. Her lab was on the third floor, and she took the stairs two at a time. The Department of Microbiology was adjacent to some pathology labs, and over the years the smell of formaldehyde had wafted throughout and soaked into the walls. She opened the doors to a corridor that was thirty feet long, lit with the sickly hue of fluorescent bulbs. On her left was a room housing caged mice. Beyond that was an equipment room filled with centrifuges the size of commercial washing machines, incubators, and scintillation counters. On the right was a lounge for the grad students and post-docs to eat lunch and drink coffee, as well as the offices belonging to the principal investigators of the two labs, Gabriel Nawthorn and Melvin Leach.
    As Benny walked down the corridor she was met by a fellow grad student who also worked in Leach’s lab, on his second pet project: the search for new antibiotics to fight staph infections. Jonathan Yovkov was an MD/PhD student, the son of a Bulgarian refugee who had slipped out from under the watchful eye of the USSR in 1971. Father and son had made their way to New York, leaving behind Jon’s mother and two sisters. Jonathan was serious about science, insofar as it was his stepping-stone to getting rich. He shared Leach’s assessment that, given the emergence of antibiotic-resistant strains of Staphylococcus , any new antibiotic would be exceptionably valuable to its discoverers. He and Leach had apprised what the other was worth to his career and interacted accordingly. What Leach offered was a lab that was creating commercial products and, with them, the opportunity to make a business out of science. Jon brought his intellect to the lab and, with it, a nascent business acumen. Jon’s book outlining the process of successfully applying to medical school was in its third printing. The royalties from that book financed the bulk of his education. His publisher was asking him to write a second guide, this time for young investors.
    Jon moved as though he had a private stash of time, gaining interest as he strolled from bench to desk to library. When Benny had first joined the lab, she assumed he lacked ambition. She was wrong. She had wanted to befriend him, knowing they might be working together for the next four or five years, but they kept grinding against each other. Instead of wearing down to something smooth, the edges of their relationship became sharp and treacherous. This morning he grinned when he saw Benny, as if he was telling himself a joke at her expense.
    Leach’s lab at the end of the corridor smelled of growing bacterial